


Infected

by Stormbringer



Series: The Last of Us [1]
Category: The Last of Us
Genre: Ficlet, Graphic Description
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-16
Updated: 2014-09-16
Packaged: 2018-02-17 16:44:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2316455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stormbringer/pseuds/Stormbringer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emily Filmore should have recovered from the chest cold, but by the time she realized something was dreadfully wrong, it was too late.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Infected

Emily Filmore had a normal enough life before it happened. It had started with a chest cold, and it should have been like any chest cold. She should have recovered, the coughing subsiding. 

But it wasn’t a chest cold. 

She started to get headaches. And the headaches… They didn’t go away. They got worse. And worse. By the time Emily Filmore realized something was dreadfully wrong, it was too late. The spores had nestled down in her brain, and had started to grow. 

*

She was in pain all day, every day: Stabbing headaches, pressure behind her eyes. Spasms wracked her limbs, jerking her fingers and hands, her feet. She curled into any secluded corner she could find, clutching her head. Each stab of pain tore a sob from her throat. It hurt, it hurt, oh god did it hurt— Why wouldn’t it stop? 

*

As the pain worsened, her vision blurred. The agony bred anger. Every sound and every movement near her was torture. Dried leaves and papers, hissing across the ground, flapping against fallen brick, tires – each rasp seemed like a knife scraping around the inside of her skull. She lashed out at the sounds, screaming, hoarse, wordless. She pulled her hair out from the roots, gouged long scratches into her arms. 

*

Each stab of pain, each wrack of her body, dredged up memories. They were random, smashed or shattered, jumbled together, strange, irreconcilable. Names and places came to her, voices and scenes. Half of her wanted to cling to the flashes, but each was filled with pain, flipping faces and places back and forth willy nilly against the screen of her mind. 

It hurt. It _hurt_. 

*

She hardly realized she was screaming when the agony started to eat out her eyes. It started from the back, in the warmth inside her skull, behind the bones of her face. Each nerve was a meal for the thing growing in her brain, devouring her one second, one millimetre, at a time. She threw herself into brick walls, against the ground, but nothing would stop that chewing, chewing agony from moving, steadily, through her eye sockets. 

*

Emily Filmore was blind. The pain had not left her, but she was no longer aware of it. 

Could this lurching thing truly be considered Emily Filmore? So much of her brain had been gnawed away, replaced by the growing fungus. Could it really be said she was anything like what she had been, who she had been? 

She moves involuntarily, pressed to go forward, to grasp, to run, by the basest of needs. The fungus replaced her eyes, and so she clicks and squeaks into the darkness, searching—searching. She puts one foot forward, and the rest of her body follows, contorting around each movement, making obvious betrayal of the hungry fungus settled in her brain. The more it eats, the less she functions. 

*

Who can say what tells the fungus its time has come? Perhaps it meets itself in the grey meal it has worked at for days, weeks. Perhaps it is aware of the fact that its lurching host hardly lurches anymore, can hardly remain upright. Whatever it is, something compels the husk that was Emily Filmore to move – forward…and down. 

When she arrives at a place that seems, somehow, suitable, she not so much eases to the ground but collapses, her legs giving out at last. Is there anything human about her but the skeletal frame? Something genetically human must still reside in her skull, else she would not have moved so far, even at the command of the fungus. Do half-eaten nerves still fire, playing things in her mind that she might recognize as faces and names if she still had the capacity to remember what a face or a name was? 

Immobile, the fungus devours Emily Filmore in earnest. Hours—days—pass before the thing that was Emily Filmore is truly dead, no brain function, no heartbeat. 

The fungus is all that remains.


End file.
